AZ-900T01: Module 02:
Core Azure services
Lesson 01: Learning objectives
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Module 2 – Learning objectives
• Understand and describe core Azure architectural components
• Understand and describe core Azure services and products
• Understand and describe Azure solutions
• Understand and describe Azure management tools
Lesson 02: Core Azure architectural components
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Regions
• Azure is made up of datacenters located around the globe. These
datacenters are organized and made available to end users by
country/region
• In reference to datacenters, a region is a geographical area on the planet
containing at least one—but potentially multiple —datacenters that are
in close proximity and networked together with a low-latency network
Regions - continued
• Special Azure regions:
• Azure also has some special regions that you might want to use when
building out your applications for compliance or legal purposes. Special
regions are:
• Azure Government
• Azure Germany
• Azure China 21Vianet
• Region pairs:
• Each Azure region is paired with another region within the same geography
(such as US, Europe, or Asia). This approach allows for the replication of
resources (such as virtual machine (VM) storage) across a geography that
helps reduce the likelihood of interruptions due to events such as natural
disasters, power outages, or physical network outages affecting both
regions at once.
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Geographies
• A geography is a discrete market typically containing two or more regions
that preserves data residency and compliance boundaries
• Geographies allow customers with specific data-residency and
compliance needs to keep their data and applications close
• Geographies are broken up into Americas, Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle
East, and Africa
Availability zones
• Availability zones are physically
separate locations within an Azure
region.
• Each availability zone is made up
of one or more datacenters
equipped with independent
power, cooling, and networking.
• Availability Zones are set up to be
an isolation boundary.
• If one availability zone goes down,
the other continues working.
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Availability sets
• Availability sets are a way to help ensure
applications remain online if a high-
impact maintenance event is required, or
a hardware failure occurs
• Availability sets are made up of update
domains and fault domains:
• Update domains. When a maintenance
event occurs (such as a performance update
or critical security patch applied), the
update is sequenced through update
domains.
• Fault domains. Fault domains provide for
the physical separation of a workload across
different hardware in the datacenter.
Resource groups
• A resource group is a unit of management for resources in Azure.
• Think of a resource group as a
container that allows you to
aggregate and manage all the
resources required for an
application in a single
manageable unit
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Azure Resource Manager
• Azure Resource Manager is a management layer in which resource
groups and all the resources within it are created, configured,
managed, and deleted
• With Azure Resource Manager, you can:
• Deploy application resources
• Organize resources
• Control access and resources
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Lesson 03: Core Azure services and products
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Azure compute services
Azure compute is an on-demand computing service for running cloud-
based applications. It provides computing resources such as disks,
processors, memory, networking and operating systems.
• Resources are available on-demand and can
typically be made available in minutes or even
seconds. You pay only for the resources you
use and only for as long as you're using them.
• Two common service types for performing
compute in Azure are VMs and containers.
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Azure compute services - virtual machine
services
VMs are software emulations of physical computers. Examples of
Azure services for virtual machines include:
Azure VMs. Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) to create and use VMs
in the cloud
VM scale sets. Designed for automatic scaling of identical
VMs
App services. platform as a service (PaaS) offering to build,
deploy, and scale enterprise-grade web, mobile, and API apps
Functions. Creates infrastructure based on an event
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Demo: Create an Azure virtual machine
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01-Walkthrough-Create a Virtual machine
using Azure Portal
• In this walkthrough task we will create a virtual machine in Azure via the
Azure Portal, configure it as a web server and connect to the web server
over the internet.
• You can complete this walkthrough task by completing the steps outlined
in the PDF document, or you can simply read through them, depending
on your available time
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Azure compute services – container services
Containers are a virtualization environment. However, unlike virtual
machines, they do not include an operating system. Containers are
meant to be lightweight, and are designed to be created, scaled out,
and stopped dynamically. Examples of Azure services for containers
include:
Azure Container Instances. A PaaS offering that allows you to
upload your containers, which it then will run for you
Azure Kubernetes Service. A container orchestrator service for
managing large numbers of containers
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Azure network services
Networking on Azure allows you to connect cloud and on-premises
infrastructure and services.
Azure Virtual Network. An IaaS service to create and use VMs in the
cloud
Azure Load Balancer. Designed for automatic scaling of identical VMs
VPN Gateway. A PaaS offering to build, deploy, and scale enterprise-
grade web, mobile, and API apps
Azure Application Gateway. Creates infrastructure based on an event
Content Delivery Network. Creates infrastructure based on an event
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02-Walkthrough-Create a virtual network via
the Azure Portal
• In this walkthrough task we will create a virtual network, deploy two
virtual machines onto that virtual network and then configure them to
allow one virtual machine to ping the other over that virtual network.
• You can complete this walkthrough task by completing the steps outlined
in the PDF document, or you can simply read through them, depending
on your available time
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Azure storage services – data categories
• Structured data. Data that adheres to a schema, so all of the data
has the same fields or properties. Structured data can be stored in a
database table with rows and columns. Examples of structured data
include, sensor data or financial data.
• Semi-structured data. Data is less organized than structured data,
and is not stored in a relational format, meaning the fields do not
neatly fit into tables, rows, and columns. Referred to as non-
relational or NoSQL data.
• Unstructured data. Data that has no designated structure to it. This
also means that there are no restrictions on the kinds of data it can
contain. For example, a blob can hold a PDF document, a JPG image,
a JSON file, or video content.
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Azure storage services – Azure services
Azure Storage is a service that you can use to store files, messages,
tables, and other types of information.
Blob storage. No restrictions on the kinds of data it can hold.
Blobs are highly scalable
Disk storage. Provides disks for virtual machines, applications,
and other services
File storage. Azure Files offers fully-managed file shares in the
cloud
Archive storage. Storage facility for data that is rarely accessed
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Demo: Create Blob storage
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03-Walkthrough-Create Blob storage
• In this walkthrough task we will create a storage account, then create a
blob storage container within that storage account, then upload a block
blob, view and edit the blob file within the blob container in Azure, and
then download the block blob file.
• You can complete this walkthrough task by completing the steps outlined
in the PDF document, or you can simply read through them, depending
on your available time
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Azure database services
Azure database services are fully-managed PaaS database services that free
up valuable time you’d otherwise spend managing your database
Azure Cosmos DB. A globally-distributed database service that
enables you to elastically and independently scale throughput
and storage
Azure SQL Database. A relational database as a service (DaaS)
based on the latest stable version of the Microsoft SQL Server
database engine
Azure Database Migration. A fully-managed service designed
to enable seamless migrations from multiple database sources
to Azure data platforms with minimal downtime
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04-Walkthrough-Create a SQL database
• In this walkthrough task we will create a SQL database in Azure and then
query the data in that database.
• You can complete this walkthrough task by completing the steps
outlined in the PDF document, or you can simply read through
them, depending on your available time
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Azure Marketplace
• Azure Marketplace is a service on Azure that helps connect end users
with Microsoft partners, independent software vendors (ISVs), and
start-ups that are offering their solutions and services, which are
optimized to run on Azure
• Azure Marketplace allows customers—mostly IT professionals and
cloud developers—to find, try, purchase, and provision applications and
services from hundreds of leading service providers, all certified to run
on Azure. At the time of writing, this includes over 8,000 listings
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Lesson 04: Azure solutions
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Internet of Things
The internet allows any item that's online-capable to access valuable
information. This ability for devices to garner and then relay
information for data analysis is referred to as the Internet of Things
(IoT)
Microsoft IoT Central. A fully-managed global IoT software
as a service (SaaS) solution that makes it easy to connect,
monitor, and manage your IoT assets at scale
Azure IoT Hub. A managed service hosted in the cloud that
acts as a central message hub for bidirectional
communication between your IoT application and the
devices it manages
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Big data and analytics
Big data refers to large volumes of data that become increasingly hard to
make sense of, or consequently make decisions about. Some big data and
analytic services in Azure include:
Azure SQL Data Warehouse: A cloud-based Enterprise Data
Warehouse that leverages massively parallel processing (mpp) to run
complex queries quickly across petabytes of data
Azure HDInsight: A fully-managed, open-source analytics service for
enterprises. It is a cloud service that makes it easier, faster, and more
cost-effective to process massive amounts of data
Azure Data Lake Analytics: An on-demand analytics job service that
simplifies big data. Instead of deploying, configuring, and tuning
hardware, you write queries to transform your data and extract
valuable insights.
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Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence (AI), in the context of cloud computing, is based
around a broad range of services, the core of which is machine learning.
Machine learning is a data science technique that allows computers to use
existing data to forecast future behaviors, outcomes, and trends. Using
machine learning, computers learn without being explicitly programmed.
Some AI services in Azure include:
Azure Machine Learning service. Provides a cloud-based
environment used to develop, train, test, deploy, manage, and
track machine learning models
Azure Machine Learning Studio. A collaborative, drag-and-drop
visual workspace where you can build, test, and deploy machine
learning solutions without needing to write code
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Serverless computing
Serverless computing is a cloud-hosted execution environment that runs
your code but abstracts the underlying hosting environment. Some
serverless services in Azure include:
Azure Functions. Concerned with the code running your service and
not the underlying platform or infrastructure. Creates infrastructure
based on an event.
Azure Logic Apps. A cloud service that helps you automate and
orchestrate tasks, business processes, and workflows when you need
to integrate apps, data, systems, and services across enterprises or
organizations.
Azure Event Grid. A fully-managed, intelligent event routing service
that uses a publish-subscribe model for uniform event consumption.
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DevOps
DevOps allows you to create, build, and release pipelines that provide
continuous integration, delivery, and deployment for your applications. It
brings together people, processes, and technology, automating software
delivery to provide continuous value to your users
Azure DevOps Services: provides development collaboration
tools including pipelines, Git repositories, Kanban boards, and
extensive automated and cloud-based load testing
Azure DevTest Labs: Allows you to quickly create environments
in Azure while minimizing waste and controlling cost
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Lesson 05: Azure management solutions
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Azure management tools
You can configure and manage Azure using a broad range of tools and
platforms. Some of these tools are:
• Azure Portal. A website accessed via a web browser at
• Azure PowerShell. A command shell scripting language
• Azure Command-Line Interface (Azure CLI). A cross-platform
command-line scripting program for Windows, Linux, or MacOS
operating systems
• Azure Cloud Shell. A browser-based scripting environment in your
portal.
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Demo: Customize the Azure Portal
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05-Walkthrough-Working with the Azure CLI
• In this walkthrough task we will install the Azure CLI on our local
machine, then create a virtual machine using the Azure CLI and an Azure
Resource Manager template, then verified that deployment using the
Azure CLI in the Azure Cloud Shell
• You can complete this walkthrough task by completing the steps
outlined in the PDF document, or you can simply read through
them, depending on your available time
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Azure Advisor
Azure Advisor is a free service built into Azure that provides
recommendations on high availability, security, performance, and cost.
Advisor analyzes your deployed services and looks for ways to improve
your environment across those four areas
With Azure Advisor, you can:
• Get proactive, actionable, and personalized best practices
recommendations
• Improve the performance, security, and high availability of
your resources as you identify opportunities to reduce
your overall Azure costs
• Get recommendations with proposed actions inline
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Lesson 06: Module 2 review questions
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Module 2 review questions
1. What are the core architectural components of Azure?
2. Every resource created in Azure must exist in one and only one what?
3. You need to deploy a legacy application in Azure that has some
customizations that are needed to ensure it runs successfully. The
application will run on a VM running the Windows operating system.
Which Azure service would you recommend to run the virtual machine
in?
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